Face to Face:
Encounters Between Jews & Blacks

Face to Face is the most auto-referential of all of Salzmann’s works, positioning Salzmann himself within the circle of inquiry. It is also the most language-centric of his works. The soul of the work and I would say its raison d’être is the series of interviews that Salzmann proceeded to hold with approximately fifty Philadelphians, half of them American Jews and half African Americans. Salzmann’s photographs support these conversations rather than drive them, even as the book design gives equal weight to pictures and words. As a photowork, Face to Face depends more explicitly on the book as its vehicle of delivery—as against other projects, which often exist in multiple forms with no hierarchy between them, including prints, books, and online galleries. In the double page devoted to the poet Lamont B. Steptoe, Salzmann photographs Steptoe in front of a mural inspired by Walt Whitman, based on a painting by the Philadelphia-based American Jewish artist and teacher Sydney Goodman. Opposite is a brief but searing account, in Steptoe’s own words, of his mother’s years working for a Pittsburgh Jewish family. Steptoe and Salzmann, in other words, grew up on opposite sides of the domestic worker economy, joined as non-brothers according to the social illogic of that system.